Battle for Bed-Stuy:The Long War on Poverty in New York CityBy Michael WoodsworthHarvard University Press (2016)​424 pg.

Reviewed by Nick Juravich

As a local Brooklyn blogger in the heyday of local Brooklyn blogs, the politics of place were my stock and trade. Writing on the border of Crown Heights – or was it Prospect Heights? – at the bleeding edge of gentrification from 2008-2013, I covered fights over everything from the names of restaurants to the placement of bike racks. These struggles always served as proxies for a larger set of questions about who wielded the power to define and shape urban spaces. In one particularly memorable episode, a realtor’s idle speculation about the possibility of selling the neighborhood as “ProCro” – quoted in the fourth paragraph of an online Wall Street Journal article – prompted local outcry so fierce that our State Assemblyman at the time, Hakeem Jeffries, introduced legislation in Albany to outlaw the practice of real-estate rebranding. As law, the bill was a dead letter, but as politics, it was dead-on: as Jeffries explained, rebranding was not just part of the process of raising rents and home prices, but served to erase the presence, impact, and needs of existing residents. “Neighborhoods have a history, culture and character that should not be tossed overboard whenever a Realtor decides it would be easier to market under another name,” Jeffries told the New York Times. ​

Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de BlasioBy Thomas J. MainNYU Press (2016), 288 pg.

Reviewed by Ariel Eisenberg

In the conclusion to Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio, Thomas J. Main writes that he, like many housed New Yorkers, first became aware of homelessness in the early 1980s when he encountered homeless people in the city’s public places. It is the visibility of the homeless – the ubiquitous presence of people living on sidewalks, in parks, and in transportation terminals – that has made them the focus of so much attention in New York City, from the late 1970s to the present day. The conundrum, as Main presents it, is that, despite the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who experience homelessness yearly, and the millions more who encounter homeless people daily, “homelessness politics in the city has mostly been made on behalf of the homeless, not by them” (202). While this analysis diminishes the role that housed New Yorkers and homeless people themselves played in shaping the city’s response to homelessness, Main seeks here to examine the growth of the city’s vast homeless services apparatus. As his book demonstrates, many of the most dramatic initiatives were the work ofa relatively small number of actors, almost all of whom were legal advocates and elected or appointed government officials.

​From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in AmericaBy Elizabeth HintonIllustrated. 449 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.Reviewed by Michael R. Glass

When I was sixteen years old, a group of friends and I thought it would be fun to make “dry ice bombs,” a contraption where the pressure of the expanding gas pops a plastic bottle. It was, indeed, tons of fun, but when a neighbor heard the long bang, she thought it was a gunshot and called 911. After falling asleep on my friend’s couch, I woke up in the middle of the night to a police officer standing over me. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

By Michael W. Flamm​On Tuesday afternoon, July 21, 1964, Lyndon Johnson voiced his private suspicion to J. Edgar Hoover that communists were somehow behind the civil unrest in New York. Now on Wednesday morning the president’s fears seemed confirmed and amplified, even if the conspiracy charge was unfounded. As he ate breakfast in bed he skimmed several newspapers, including the Daily News. The article that immediately captured his attention was ‘‘Blame Hate Groups, Red & White, for Harlem Terror’’ by three reporters. They broke the news that a five-month investigation spearheaded by the FBI and detectives with the Bureau of Special Service (BOSS) unit -— the NYPD’s ‘‘Red Squad’’ —- had uncovered fifty paid operatives and a thousand ‘‘young fanatics dedicated to violence.’’ Their instructions: ‘‘Deploy! Incite!’’ According to an unnamed source the communist conspirators were ‘‘beatniks, crumbums, addicts, and thieves’’ who received payment in cash and narcotics.

Reading these essays, I miss Adina Back (1958-2008).[1]She should be commenting on these exciting pieces of original scholarship, written by representatives of a new generation of historians who will completely overturn everything we thought we knew about the struggles over education in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. Adina was a committed public historian, a progressive activist-intellectual, and a generous mentor. Our paths did not cross in New York University’s graduate program in History; I started three years after she finished. When I expressed interest in writing a dissertation on interracial activism in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1960s, my professor, Danny Walkowitz said the first thing I should read should be Adina’s dissertation.[2] I did, and it served as a model, both for how I thought about historical research on activism and my role as an historian writing about problems that were still such a large part of social and political life in my city and nation.

On the anniversary of a pivotal struggle at I.S. 201 in Harlem over the failure of the New York City’s school system to fulfill the mandates of Brown v. Board of Education, this roundtable explores the historical and contemporary significance of 1966 as “a year of struggles that remade the history of education in New York City”[1]. While the year is described as pivotal, the roundtable makes an argument for the enduring nature of the fight for equality in the city’s schools, from the Cold War to the present. The roundtable contributes to recent historical work that counters the more commonplace narratives of decline after the late 1960s and expands the black/white binary.[2]​

Editors' Note: This is part of a roundtable series,“New Histories of Education in New York City.” For an introduction and overview, click here. ​​​

In our final post, Jean Park explodes the “model minority” myth by showing how “cultural” patterns of academic success in Korean American New York are in fact predicated on the existence of academic-support institutions. The “hakwon,” or cram academy, an institution imported from Korea to Queens, guides students into selective New York City high schools, revealing that success in New York City public schooling relies not on “grit,” “work ethic” or the right “culture” at home, but on structural factors that shape opportunities.

By Jean ParkFifty years ago, a New York Times piece titled “Success Story: Japanese-American Style,” became a harbinger for the “model minority” label and its cultural explanation for Asian-American success that still persists today. The author of the piece, William Petersen, attributed Japanese Americans’ successes in spite of the overt racism and persecution they experienced just two decades prior to “their meaningful links with an alien culture.”[1] In recent months, The New York Times and the New Yorker provided more space for discourse surrounding “the invisible Asian;”[2] while giving room for debate amongst scholars, the comments by readers of such publications betrayed their belief in the model minority stereotype, and the continued emphasis on culture as the basis for the achievement of Asian-Americans.

Editors' Note: This is part of a roundtable series,“New Histories of Education in New York City.” For an introduction and overview, click here. ​

In our fourth post, Lauren Lefty asks us what the story of community control looks like from a Puerto Rican perspective. She excavates histories of transnationalism and empire from above and below; elite ideas and policies from the “culture of poverty” to charter schools circulated between island and mainland, while grassroots organizers mobilized transnational networks along a “continual line of self-determination.” When we take empire and decolonization seriously, and see schools as “a key site to engage questions of sovereignty,” “local control” is not so local at all.

By Lauren Lefty

In a 1970 issue of Palante!, the Young Lords’ bi-monthly publication, Richie Peréz links the actions at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem to the anti-imperial struggle being waged in Puerto Rico and the Third World more broadly.

Four years after the I.S. 201 controversy, and two years after the explosive 1968 teachers strikes, East Harlem’s Benjamin Franklin High School found itself at the center of yet another community control battle. After the transfer of a long-time principal to a nearby high school, community members decided to elect one of the acting deans to assume the vacant position, a former black teacher from the neighborhood who received local parents’ stamp of approval. After the Board of Education denied this request based on claims of inadequate qualification, students staged a walk-out, 4,400 pupils boycotted classes, and students and parent activists eventually occupied the building until their demands were met. The New York Times framed the event as yet another community control dispute in the black-white standoff that now characterized city politics. Yet what the Times reporter failed to mention were the Puerto Rican flags draped from the second floor windows of the brick building on Pleasant Ave., and the unique perspective the hundreds of involved Puerto Rican students, parents, and activists brought to the table. As Richie Perez phrased it in Palante!, the periodical of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, “The issue at Franklin is not just a matter of a principal. It’s a matter of whether of not we have the right to control our own lives…Seize the Schools! Que Viva Puerto Rico libre!”[1]

Editors' Note: This is part of a roundtable series,“New Histories of Education in New York City.” For an introduction and overview, click here.

​One year after the struggle at IS 201 began, Harlem residents came together to create central Harlem’s only high school, the independent “Harlem Prep.” In our second post, Barry Goldenberg excavates the history of this “community school,” revealing the unlikely combination of corporate capital and community support that helped the institution graduate over 800 students – most of them dropouts from the public system – in just over a decade.

By Barry M. Goldenberg

In the waning months of 1966, Harlem parents and activists stood in firm protest over the opening of Intermediate School 201 in Harlem. Promised by the city’s education leaders a new integrated school both in students and staff, parents and activists were outraged when neither of these promises were kept. Notably, over the past five decades, historians have aptly documented how, in result, parents and local activists protested to have their voices heard in the education of their children.[1] The story of I.S. 201 in which the local community battled with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the Board of Education is an important one about the racial tensions in New York City (and elsewhere), the frailty of political alliances, and, above all, about relationships between schools, education, and their communities.

A picture taken from an article on Harlem Prep in the Summer 1971 edition of The Lamp, a magazine printed by Standard Oil of New Jersey. University of Texas-Austin, Briscoe Center Archives.

Editors' Note: This is part of a roundtable series,“New Histories of Education in New York City.” For an introduction and overview, click here.

​In our first post, Michael R. Glass details the “twelve years of conflicts that preceded the opening of IS 201.” Desegregation, Glass demonstrates, was not about “wanting to sit next to white folks,” but a strategy deployed in service to a “broad, transformative vision of educational equity.” Community control was a strategy, too, developed in response to bureaucratic intransigence and massive popular resistance on the part of white, middle-class communities. Across these twelve years, parent activists sought both community empowerment and an equitable distribution of municipal resources, struggles that continue in our own time.

​By Michael R. Glass

Teachers stood in front of empty classrooms. The hallways, the cafeteria, the gymnasium -- all were eerily silent. When Intermediate School 201 first opened its doors fifty years ago, none of its five hundred students reported to the gleaming new building. Instead, it sat vacant for ten long days as an intense standoff ensued between parent-activists and school officials.

The school’s opening was supposed to be celebratory. After all, the Board of Education had unveiled IS 201 as a showcase school. Perched atop fourteen-foot concrete stilts on the corner of Madison Avenue and 127th Street in East Harlem, it towered over the neighborhood like a lighthouse. It cost five million dollars to build. It was the first fully-air-conditioned school in the city. And with extensive offerings in art, music, and foreign languages, its curriculum would be state of the art.​It was also supposed to be integrated.